Sunday, 21 April 2013

Bangladesh: Death To Bloggers!!!

Bangladesh’s Islamists Call for Death of ‘Atheist Bloggers’

The Bengali calendar turned anew on April 15th marking the beginning of
the year 1420. But a rising tide of violent confrontations and
political bickering makes it seem like the country is slipping back to
the year 1420, in the Gregorian calendar.
On April 6, hundreds of thousands of men and boys spread out across the
sweltering capital Dhaka to call for, among other things, the hanging
of atheists. The mass mobilization of Islamists was spurred by a handful
of “atheist” bloggers who are supposedly so offensive to Islam that
they should face the hangman’s noose.
“There is no place in this country for atheists,” was one of the
friendlier refrains that a supporter of the organizers, Hefazet Islami, a
Sunni Muslim outfit from the country’s second largest city, Chittagong,
told me.
The Islamist marchers listed 84 bloggers who they demand be arrested or
hanged, In February an atheist blogger named Rajib was stabbed to death
a month after blogger Asif Mohiuddin was nearly killed for his beliefs.